No End to War. The Frum-Perle prescription would ensnare America in endless conflict.

The American Conservative ^ | 1 march 04 | Patrick J. Buchanan

[Shermy]

Russell Kirk is turning over in his grave at the notion that you probably call yourself a 'conservative.'

BTW, the Chinese thank you for your support.

Are you responding to my #79? It's completely incongruous, but you're an intelligent person so I assume you're responding here to a post of mine on a different thread.

[AmericanVictory]

Seems like we and the whole industrial world became "ensnared" when we chose to become dependent upon oil from Muslim lands. That is a reality Pat seems to not want to deal with.

[u-89]

>"I find Buchanan's casual dismissal of September 11 offensive, as well as his crude Jew-baiting "

Please point out something specific in the article that is Jew baiting. I'm not here to defend Buchanan, I'm here to debate policy as it is critical that such grave matters are analyzed. Policies that Buchanan advocates are not logically dissected. They have been ridiculed and disparaged as anti-semetic though. Buchanan addresses this phenomenon in this article in detail.

Here are some points made in the article:

Washington warned against having a passion attachment to a foreign nation as it would imperil America

Neocons (both Jew and gentile versions) have a very long paper trail (which you could google) outlining their support for Israel and not just Israel but the Likud Party vision of Israel (which is factionalism, another thing Washington warned against). Many have actively worked for Likud Party. This support for Likud is not merely an academic side hobby but forms the basis for their world view and they actively try to influence American policy to suit their priorities.

The neocons see only war as an option and do not like other's desire to negotiate peaceful settlements. And they quickly smear any opposing policy suggestions in a viscous manner - again there is a long paper trail to attest to this.

One can not discuss our current foreign policy without mentioning neocons because they hold influential positions in this administration and in the media. Remember this article is a book review of An End to Evil. A book written by two prominent neocons.

All these things are verifiable facts. If you can specifically point out that any or all are not then please by all means do so.

How does Buchanan dismiss 9/11? Please explain that.

> "The continuing festering of a dysfunctional Middle East is a tremendous threat to the United States, as Sept. 11 proved."

Yes. The question is how did the festering dysfunctional mid east problem come to involve us? Your take on that would be enlightening.

[u-89]

>and the rich get richer . . .

And Perle gets richer...

[u-89]

>Seems like we and the whole in****rial world became "ensnared" when we chose to become dependent upon oil from Muslim lands. That is a reality Pat seems to not want to deal with.

I disagree with your take for the following reasons. Back during the build up to Gulf War One Pat opposed the war. The proponents of war claimed that Saddam would control the worlds oil supply and we all would be ruined. Pat poignantly asked "What's Saddam going to do with all that oil, drink it?" Sounds funny but a great truth lies there. Saddam or any other wacko Arab King, Sheik or strongman only has oil as a means to create wealth. They do business with us or they're ruined. And they can not blackmail us into unreasonably high prices because there is no shortage of oil in the world. If the price goes up too high then it becomes profitable to tap other oil sources that remain untapped or in low production.

What ensnares the west in the mid east is not our indutrial dependence on oil but our corporate profits. We're the ones who developed the Arab facilities and our companies have big stakes in the region and wish to remain there.

[Filibuster_60]

Too lazy to find the links. The 40,000 figure was mentioned by Perle to a left-wing reported named David Corn sometime in 2002. I also remember Perle saying "Chalabi was the plan" in response to criticism that the Pentagon didn't adequately prepare for postwar Iraq. That was sometime last summer and it put Perle squarely at odds with Feith's Future of Iraq office which was already too ashamed to admit it didn't really have an alternative to Chalabi & his exile friends.

[general_re]

You will, I assume, excuse me if I decline to accept it simply on your say-so.

[u-89]

I don't have a link but you are correct about the 40,000 number to take Iraq in a cakewalk, though I'm not sure it was Perle who said it, it may have been Rumsfeld. I remember discussing that on a thread here on FR at the time. Some top Pentagon General made objections to that notion and said so publicly and added that we'd need several hundred thousand men for the job plus that many for a decade or more of occupation and he got slapped down hard by Wolfowitz.

[Britton J Wingfield]

Poor guy fell out of a guard tower at Auschwitz.

Yeah, he was laughing so hard he slipped and fell.

[AmericanVictory]

Well, as many on this forum know, the answer to these problems is all in one solution. Better technology is available which can end the oil dependence. However, the companies which thrive on the dependence here wish to either take such technology without paying for it and control it, or, failing that, block its implementation, valuing their own dominance over winning the Terror War in that respect. Pat, at least in my experience in trying to communicate with him about it, has no interest in such solutions, any more than do our "leaders" in Washington. Just asserting that oil is fungible does not actually solve anything. And I strongly disagree with the contention that the OPEC monopoly and our dependence upon the Islamic world has done us no harm.

[vaudine]

And your answer is?

vaudine

[u-89]

>And I strongly disagree with the contention that the OPEC monopoly and our dependence upon the Islamic world has done us no harm.

Who is contending that? The US has meddled in Arab politics since WWII, supporting tyrants, overthrowing those who wouldn't dance on our string and the Brits and French have been screwing around over there since they pushed out the Turks. Buchanan has long advocated that we should not meddle in their affairs. As for your assertion that better technology would lessen our dependence on oil, I agree. But both parties on mere tools of big oil and oil is so profitable that we won't switch to other means of energy till the last drop of oil is gone.

[JohnGalt]

Conservative government might be a decent start.

[reluctantwarrior]

Ahmed Chalabi could of stepped in but he was deemed controversial by the Garner run CPA. Perle was correct in that the fall of bagdad took three brigades and the north took a brigade so if you count triggerpullers and gloss over the log tail it took a little less than 40,000

[JohnGalt]

You pinged me to a post where you stated your WOW theory that you grasp but Pat and some others don't yet grasp.


That is nonsensical in the context of conservative thought. I cited the dean of Post-WWII American conservatism Russell Kirk precisely because he diagnosed the intellectual emptiness of the national security state in the late '50s.

And yes, the Chinese find our current soccermom driven war on some terror to be quite quaint and are all to happy to purchase United States debt on the open market.

[marron]

But how is our survival as a nation menaced when not one American has died in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11?

That may have something to do with the fact that we are chasing them down where ever they hide. We didn't do that before, and they killed us with impunity over 30 years, and were getting bolder by the day. They are learning that they are not invulnerable.

...Yet even this will never “overthrow our civilization.”... We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.

What will overthrow our civilization is the loss of confidence. He cites case after case where Americans were killed in the past, but in the past Americans fought and fought back hard. They did not question whether they had the right to fight. But over the last 30 years we have not responded to muslim terror and it has only gotten bolder.

Terrorism is simply a term for the murder of non-combatants for political ends.

Brilliant. And war is what I want to happen when people make a habit of using terror on American citizens. I don't elect people to office to feed me, or wipe my nose. I do elect them to manage the physical security of American citizens. If they can't do that job, I'll vote someone else in.

Bush’s father made Hafez al-Assad an ally in the Gulf War.

This is dishonest. Syria sent a token force and did no fighting. Bush's big win was to assure that none of the Arab countries directly aided Saddam during the war. Syria was critical to isolating Iraq as we have since learned in spades. That doesn't make them an ally, but it does point up the diplomatic coup that Bush pulled off.

While the Saudis have been diffident allies in the War on Terror, they are not America’s enemies.

Well, its more complicated than that. The Saudis directly funded Osama's operation, and have refused to stop funding it. They are providing a good deal of the funding for the fighting we face now in Iraq. They are also going through an existential crisis that is of their own making, as the consequences of their Death Cult occasionally splash back on them, and as members of the royal family jockey for power within the kingdom. That doesn't necessarily make them allies. It makes certain royals occasional allies. But it varies from week to week.

And it goes on from there. His stuff is even more rich in material than a Chomsky piece, you could easily fisk it line by line. The jist of it is that World War 2 could have been won victoriously by simply expelling the Japanese Air Force from Hawaii.

[AmericanVictory]

Well, we agree, except that we took the Faustian deal long before WWII, just after WWI in fact when the House of Saud chose to make a deal with U.S. Big Oil because they thought the Brits might insist they get rid of slavery, which they didn't outlaw publicly until 1963, though even then they did not really give it up. You're right about Big Oil, of course, and Big Ethanol is in there too. But we're no longer sure they're going to be able to stop the changes that will obsolesce what they're presently doing, though they'll try. But Pat has no forward vision in this area that I've been able to detect and no sense of entrepreneurial solutions. He's a very good historian. The truth is that technlogical changes that will occur in this century will make his kind of isolationist views unsustainable.

[Shermy]

As for the debt, the Chinese I bet gladly buy it and get much in return, to our disfavor. Though the process predates the WOT and began with the round of "tax cuts" without spending cuts. More borrow-and-spend Republicanism.

[JohnGalt]

The Chinese take the long-view where as Americans, of late, have shown a tendency to search out foreign monsters to destroy. They must think we are quaint.

[Shermy]

Agreed.